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Sinclair Target’s long, deeply researched history of the format wars over RSS are an excellent read and a first-rate example of what Charlie Stross has called “the beginning of history”: for the first time, the seemingly unimportant workaday details of peoples’ lives are indelibly recorded and available for people researching history (for example, Ada Palmer points out that we know very little about the everyday meals of normal historical people, but the daily repasts of normal 21 centurians are lavishly documented).

I was there for the RSS format wars: I had some of the key players like Rael Dornfest and Aaron Swartz in my home while these flamewars were going on, and I talked about their mailing list contributions as they worked through the issues; I also was there during face-to-face arguments among some of they key players (I volunteered for several years as a conference committee member for the O’Reilly P2P and Emerging Tech conferences, where much of this played out).

That all said, I think Target’s piece focuses too much on the micro and not enough on the macro. The individual differences and personalities in the RSS wars were a real drag on the format’s adoption and improvement, but that’s not what killed RSS.

What killed RSS was the growth of digital monopolies, who created silos, walled gardens, and deliberate incompatibility between their services to prevent federation, syndication, and interoperability, and then fashioned a set of legal weapons that let them invoke the might of the state to shut down anyone who dared disrupt them.

As Target says, the early promise of the internet was summed up by Kevin Werbach’s characterization: “allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope.” But thanks to generations of antitrust malpractice and financialization, we now live in an era of five massive services filled with screenshots from the other four.

The individuals who made RSS were and are flawed vessels, like all humans, myself included. They did brilliant things and dumb things. But their errors didn’t kill RSS: a massive, seismic regulatory and economic shift did. It’s like blaming rhino conservationists’ internal disputes — rather than climate change — for the decline in rhinos’ numbers. Yes, internal struggle may make people less effective in making change, but the external forces need to be taken into consideration here.

The fork happened after Dornfest announced a proposed RSS 1.0 specification and formed the RSS-DEV Working Group—which would include Davis, Swartz, and several others but not Winer—to get it ready for publication. In the proposed specification, RSS once again stood for “RDF Site Summary,” because RDF had been added back in to represent metadata properties of certain RSS elements. The specification acknowledged Winer by name, giving him credit for popularizing RSS through his “evangelism.” But it also argued that RSS could not be improved in the way that Winer was advocating. Just adding more elements to RSS without providing for extensibility with a module system would ”sacrifice scalability.” The specification went on to define a module system for RSS based on XML namespaces.

Winer felt that it was “unfair” that the RSS-DEV Working Group had arrogated the “RSS 1.0” name for themselves. In another mailing list about decentralization, he wrote that he had “recently had a standard stolen by a big name,” presumably meaning O’Reilly, which had convened the RSS-DEV Working Group. Other members of the Syndication mailing list also felt that the RSS-DEV Working Group should not have used the name “RSS” without unanimous agreement from the community on how to move RSS forward. But the Working Group stuck with the name. Dan Brickley, another member of the RSS-DEV Working Group, defended this decision by arguing that “RSS 1.0 as proposed is solidly grounded in the original RSS vision, which itself had a long heritage going back to MCF (an RDF precursor) and related specs (CDF etc).” He essentially felt that the RSS 1.0 effort had a better claim to the RSS name than Winer did, since RDF had originally been a part of RSS. The RSS-DEV Working Group published a final version of their specification in December. That same month, Winer published his own improvement to RSS 0.91, which he called RSS 0.92, on UserLand’s website. RSS 0.92 made several small optional improvements to RSS, among which was the addition of the tag soon used by podcasters everywhere. RSS had officially forked.

The fork might have been avoided if a better effort had been made to include Winer in the RSS-DEV Working Group. He obviously belonged there; he was a prominent contributor to the Syndication mailing list and responsible for much of RSS’ popularity, as the members of the Working Group themselves acknowledged. But, as Davis wrote in an email to me, Winer “wanted control and wanted RSS to be his legacy so was reluctant to work with us.” Winer supposedly refused to participate. Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly, explained this in a UserLand discussion group in September, 2000:

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I used Duet Display for a long time. I was frustrated by their inability to work with Apple to get their software to work like it used to work.

Duet frustrated me further by having an outdated web site, their “Check for Updates” didn’t work, and the best way to get information and new software was to ping their employees on Twitter and wait for an emailed link.

Locking your screen? Duet required your password because it relies on AirPlay. So even if you have an Apple Watch correctly configured, you can’t unlock your Mac with it while using Duet.

Luna seemed a second coming. Hardware? Check. Duet is all software. Wifi? Check. Duet needs USB unless you have a pro account. Resolutions? Check. Duet can’t do full iPad Pro resolutions because of its software basis. Luna resolves that with their Micro-DisplayPort (or USB-C) dongle.

Luna does display fully on the iPad Pro. Wifi works, sort of, but USB is more reliable and the only option in a corporate environment. Unlocking with an Apple Watch is also a no-go.

Oh, but the resolution thing – it always defaults to the HiDPI resolution. So even if you want to always use higher resolution (which still looks great), you have to manually select it every time. When Luna needs to reconnect? You have to manually reconfigure the resolution.

There’s lag even with the dongle and USB.

Trying to run my MacBook Air in headless mode with Luna Display was ultimately unsatisfactory.

One key thing Duet offers that Luna doesn’t is the touch bar at the bottom of the screen. While there are many problems with it, it had its utility.

My advice: unless you need your iPad Pro to work at full resolution, you need touchbar capabilities on the iPad, or you need non iPad Pro support (neither does well with iPhones) – get Duet. Otherwise, get Luna.

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Aside from a single model made by Onyx, E-ink phones are basically dead as a door nail. Ar at least they were until Kyocera released the Card-Keitai phone in Japan last year.

This phone sports a 2.8″ E-ink screen with frontlight and touchscreen. It weighs 47 grams, and has both Wifi and 4G LTE. Retail is around 330 euros, and it is reportedly only available through NTT.

The Card-Keitai is apparently running a very limited version of Android. It only has a few apps, and is mostly intended to act as a companion to your smartphone. That would really make it something closer to the Txtr Beagle or the Oaxis Inkcase, only a lot more expensive and with a little more functionality.

Neither the Inkcase nor the Beagle had much success before they were discontinued, and it is very likely that the Card-Keitai will follow the same path.

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Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “The Killing Jar” from Peepshow (1988) is easily one of the band’s finest tracks from an incredible body of work that has aged with grace. I consider this isolated recording below of Siouxsie’s soaring and hauntingly majestic vocals to be a gift from a time when I wore too much eyeliner and drove hundreds of miles with my best friend to see the Peepshow performance in a small Detroit theater. Yes, it was worth it.

[embedded content]

And here is the full recording of “The Killing Jar”: [embedded content]

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Once as important as the American railroad and electrical grid, American phone companies aren’t quite what they used to be. With the use of copper-based landlines having plummeted the last few years, many of the nation’s phone companies have understandably attempted to shift their business models toward new, more profitable sectors like video advertising.

The problem: many of their aging fixed-line networks were not only built on the backs of billions in taxpayer subsidies, they’re very much still in use—and for many, slow, expensive DSL is the only broadband available. But with no local competition and local and federal oversight eroded by lobbying—many of these companies have simply stopped caring.

Case in point: Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson last week released a scathing 133-page report highlighting how the state’s incumbent phone company, Frontier Communications, has increasingly refused to upgrade its aging network, often taking months to make repairs, putting those with medical conditions at risk.

“The findings of this investigation detail an extraordinary situation, where customers have suffered with outages of months, or more, when the law requires telephone utilities to make all reasonable efforts to prevent interruptions of service,” the state AG said.

“Frontier customers with these outages include those with family members with urgent medical needs, such as pacemakers monitored by their medical teams via the customer’s landline,” said the AG, which notes Frontier violated more than 35 state laws and rules by failing to respond to customer repair requests in a reasonable timeframe.

The report, based on data collected from over 1,000 complaints and half-a-dozen public hearings, provides photographic evidence of the company’s neglected network, including network pedestals left abandoned to the elements:

Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, which helps local communities explore connectivity alternatives to apathetic monopolies. Mitchell told me via email such neglect is routine for companies that don’t want to upgrade aging DSL lines, yet simultaneously lobby for laws banning towns and cities from building better networks.

“State and federal elected officials have been negligent in allowing companies like Windstream [another lagging U.S. phone company] and Frontier—particularly for a business model that is mining a public safety telephone system for all it is worth—to charge as much as they can until the network literally rots,” Mitchell said.

One problem is that internet voice and VOIP services became more common in the early aughts, the nation’s phone companies used this surge in voice competition to convince both state and federal lawmakers meaningful oversight was no longer necessary. Now, for every state like Minnesota, there’s countless states that do little to nothing about this dysfunction.

The result are companies that can’t even technically offer even the FCC’s base definition of “broadband” (25 Mbps), yet often charge the same or higher prices users in more developed areas pay for gigabit (1000 Mbps) broadband. All while actively undermining local community efforts to build better, faster broadband networks.

Mitchell pointed to numerous examples where Frontier executives and lobbyists have attempted to sue, hinder, or otherwise hamstring local efforts to bring better service to these long-neglected areas. If Frontier doesn’t want to upgrade its lines, Mitchell noted, the least it can do is get out of the way of those looking at creative, local alternatives.

“In 2019, any policy maker that listens to a lobbyist from Frontier should be held criminally negligent,” Mitchell said.

And while next-gen wireless networks may provide an additional competitive option to some of these neglected users in time, we’ve discussed at length how wireless isn’t going to be a magic bullet on this front due to geographical limitations, bandwidth usage restrictions, and high prices.

With neither competition nor government accountability to force its hand, most American phone companies now operate in an accountability vacuum. And while users that can flee to alternative options continue to do so, there’s still millions of Americans stuck with companies making it very clear that actually giving a damn about paying customers is among their lowest priorities.

Corporations should be up in arms about this. The amount of redundancy and resilience in telco providers’ networks should trigger all kinds of alarms around business continuity and disaster recovery planning. And don’t forget, just because you have two telcos doesn’t mean they are on separate infrastructure. I learned this the hard way when I found out my redundant, path and provider diverse circuits for Western Michigan were none of the above – it all ran through one legacy card in one legacy chassis in one un-manned substation. That was not a good Friday, although it fell on Good Friday.

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Kirie (切り絵, literally ‘cut picture’) is the Japanese art of paper-cutting. Variations of kirie can be found in cultures around the world but the Japanese version is said to be derived from religious ceremonies and can be traced back to around the AD 700s. In its most conventional form, negative space is cut from a single sheet of white paper and then contrasted against a black background to reveal a rendering. Veteran kirie artist Masayo Fukuda has been practicing the art from for 25 years and recently revealed what she says is her greatest masterpiece of 2018.

Although the intricate piece looks like several layers overlapped, Fukuda stayed true to the conventional form, using only a single sheet of paper to render her detailed depiction of an octopus. The level of detail at times even looks like a fine ballpoint pen drawing. But a closer look confirms indeed that each and every detail is carefully made from cut-out negative space in the white paper.

If you’re interested in Fukuda’s work, she’ll be showcasing her kirie in a joint exhibition planned for next year. She’ll be showing her work along with fellow kirie artist Jun at Miraie Gallery in Osaka from April 24 – April 30, 2019.

Fukuda also shared this image as a teaser to her upcoming show, which would suggest that we can expect more stunning cut-outs of underwater life

At first glance, the octopus in the video above might appear to be breathing. A second look reveals that it isn’t actually breathing, nor is it actually an octopus at all, but seemingly just a highly detailed drawing of one. Only upon the third look, if even then, does it become clear that the octopus has been not drawn but intricately cut, and out of a single large sheet of paper at that. The two-dimensional sea creature represents a recent high point in the work of Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda, who has practiced this curious craft, known as kirie, for more than a quarter of a century now.

Greg McKeown, from his book, Essentialism:
> If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these very activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.
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You either have a passion for the Japanese culture or just want to eat sushi every day, you’ve probably decided already:“I want to live in Japan!”Am I right?However, there is some important information you need to find out before deciding to come here!What I will cover in this article will be related to money. More precisely, the amount of salary paid by companies, taxes and reasons.

From a monthly salary of 200,000 yen you get deducted 20 %?!

Have you heard someone saying that “When you are looking for work (be it contract, temporary, part time or full time) in Japan, you are drawn 20% of your salary?” and thought to yourself “Maybe a tax? But Why so much? Is it mandatory?”

In this article, I will explain thoroughly what and why 20% is deducted and many other important things you should know if you are planning to work here!

If the salary is less than 1,300,000 yen per year and the monthly income is less than 88,000 yen, income tax is not applied.Then, in the case of more than 1,300,000 yen, how much will be the tax?

Here`s an example to help you understand it better:

First of all, let’s take a person whose monthly salary is 200,000 yen a month as an example.For a salary of 200,000 yen a month, the annual income will be 2,4 million yen. In this case, the income tax will be around 56,000 yen per year and if you convert it, the tax deducted every month will be 4,700 yen.Besides taxes is anything else being deducted?

Yes, below there are more details about everything being withdrawn from your salary:

The largest amount withdrawn is the for the company`s insurance.

The company`s insurance is a social insurance system that includes health insurance, welfare pension insurance, employment insurance, workers compensation insurance etc.

I will briefly explain the types of insurance included in the social insurance system:

Health insurance is a type of coverage that pays for medical/surgical expenses( injury, illness, childbirth, death) incurred by the insured/a person who works for a company. Even if you are not a Japanese citizen, cases when you get sick or suffer an injury may happen, so the state / municipality will bear a part of the expenses(such as treatment expenses).

In addition, there are situations when you may surpass a certain amount for high-cost medical expenses, but you can receive a refund after. For more details, please refer to the Kenporeon Website. *Japanese Only

When paying for health insurance, you automatically receive an insurance card that you`ll need to show whenever you go for a health check/hospital.

2. Pension Insurance

The employees’ pension insurance is a public pension system for the employees. It is a system for people with ages between 20 and 59 years old that provide benefits when retiring; the accumulated amount will be received according to the Old-Age Benefits. There are also unfortunate cases that lead to death (because of illness, disability or injuries) when the family gets the pension of the deceased one.

There are disadvantages such as paying insurance for over 10 years in order to receive an employee’s pension and also the current system says you can only get it when you turn 65 years old. So, there are many things to take in consideration when it comes to your future.For those that are freelancers, temporary workers, unemployed people, etc. they will need to join the “National Pension”system and pay themselves.

In the present Japan, according to a set of factors(mainly working conditions), joining the system becomes mandatory and I will explain it in detail below:

If (A) and (B) below are Regular three-quarter or full time employees, they are insured persons.

(A) Working hours-If the working time per week is at least one of a Regular three-quarter employee

(B) Number of working days-If the working time per month is at least one of a Regular three-quarter employee

So, the number of working hours should be over 30 hours and the number of working days per month, more than 15 days.The reason is that the company calculates the employee`s working time reported to 5 days a week /8 hours per day, 40 hours × 3/4 = 30 hours or more, deducting the national holidays/weekends, the monthly working days will be calculated as 20 days × 3/4 = 15 days or more.

Based on the income amount of the previous example here is how I calculated it:

Employment insurance (insurance) is a system of insurance concerning unemployment / employment continuation etc. based on employment insurance law in Japan. The insurer is the Japanese government.A typical benefit is “job seeker benefit” (so-called unemployment insurance) that can receive for a certain period of time when unemployed.The insurance that the employer must notify the participation to workers who work 20 hours a week.

The amount paid is the amount of 5/1000 minutes of face value of salaried money, and if you earn 200,000 yen per month it is about 1000 yen amount.Likewise, if you work within 20 hours a week, you do not need to pay employment insurance, but if you work for more than 20 hours, you need to pay, and it will be a non-refundable insurance.

4. Resident’s tax

Another tax you`ll have to pay is the inhabitant tax(a tax on income).Same as income tax, there is a tax rate to decide an inhabitant`s tax amount. However, the resident will get it deducted from the previous year`s income and won`t get it withdrawn from his/hers first salary.Residents` taxes vary depending on the prefecture/city you live in; for example,Tokyo’s residence tax is about 9,958 yen.

Conclusion

To summarize the above explanation, it is a fact that you can not receive the full salary because a small amount from it will be deducted monthly according to the working hours for that month in order to pay the taxes mandatory for the country.Of course, there are cases when some people have a really low income, therefore the tax they will be paying will also be lower and entering the company`s insurance won`t be mandatory for such situations. However, if the monthly salary is 200,000 yen, the insurance company, employment insurance, resident taxes` all together deducted will result into an amount of 43,858 yen, almost 20% of the salary you are supposed to be getting.

Also, as explained earlier, for your first working year in Japan, you won`t be needing to pay the residence tax. So, with 200,000 yen per month, the amount withdrawn, such as company insurance, employment insurance, income tax, etc., will be about 33,900 yen. (That means a few differences in trial calculations).

People who work in Japan and those who plan on coming here in the future have to comprehend the circumstances of all these Japanese tax and insurances introduced above, know what what they are paying and have an idea of what to expect or what to ask for when working for a company in Japan. That way, living here will become much easier when you know get a hold of the situation.

Also, in case of troubles with your employer, such as unpaid salary, contracts not being respected etc., you can consult with “Tokyo Labor Counseling Information Center”`s labor standards supervision department.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the above, so don’t take it as actual tax advice. However, in my experience it seems a decent summary of the things one should think about before pulling up stakes. I would have liked this kind of summary before I moved. Please note that I fixed some formatting and English above, but your mileage may still vary.

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Look. You can’t plan out your life. What you have to do is first discover your passion – what you really care about.

Barack Obama

If, like many, you are searching for your calling in life – perhaps you are still unsure which profession aligns with what you most care about – here are five recent research findings worth taking into consideration.

First, there’s a difference between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive passion. If you can find a career path or occupational goal that fires you up, you are more likely to succeed and find happiness through your work – that much we know from the deep research literature. But beware – since a seminal paper published in 2003 by the Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand and colleagues, researchers have made an important distinction between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive one. If you feel that your passion or calling is out of control, and that your mood and self-esteem depend on it, then this is the obsessive variety, and such passions, while they are energising, are also associated with negative outcomes such as burnout and anxiety. In contrast, if your passion feels in control, reflects qualities that you like about yourself, and complements other important activities in your life, then this is the harmonious version, which is associated with positive outcomes, such as vitality, better work performance, experiencing flow, and positive mood.

Secondly, having an unanswered calling in life is worse than having no calling at all. If you already have a burning ambition or purpose, do not leave it to languish. A few years ago, researchers at the University of South Florida surveyed hundreds of people and grouped them according to whether they felt like they had no calling in life, that they had a calling they’d answered, or they had a calling but had never done anything about it. In terms of their work engagement, career commitment, life satisfaction, health and stress, the stand-out finding was that the participants who had a calling they hadn’t answered scored the worst across all these measures. The researchers said that this puts a different spin on the presumed benefits of having a calling in life. They concluded: ‘having a calling is only a benefit if it is met, but can be a detriment when it is not as compared to having no calling at all’.

The third finding to bear in mind is that, without passion, grit is ‘merely a grind’. The idea that ‘grit’ is vital for career success was advanced by the psychologist Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, who argued that highly successful, ‘gritty’ people have impressive persistence. ‘To be gritty,’ Duckworth writes in her 2016 book on the subject, ‘is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.’ Many studies certainly show that being more conscientious – more self-disciplined and industrious – is associated with more career success. But is that all that being gritty means? Duckworth has always emphasised that it has another vital component that brings us back to passion again – alongside persistence, she says that gritty people also have an ‘ultimate concern’ (another way of describing having a passion or calling).

However, according to a paper published last year, the standard measure of grit has failed to assess passion (or more specifically, ‘passion attainment’) – and Jon Jachimowicz at Columbia Business School in New York and colleagues believe this could explain why the research on grit has been so inconsistent (leading to claims that it is an overhyped concept and simply conscientiousness repackaged). Jachimowicz’s team found that when they explicitly measured passion attainment (how much people feel they have adequate passion for their work) and combined this with a measure of perseverance (a consistency of interests and the ability to overcome setbacks), then the two together did predict superior performance among tech-company employees and university students. ‘Our findings suggest that perseverance without passion attainment is mere drudgery, but perseverance with passion attainment propels individuals forward,’ they said.

Another finding is that, when you invest enough effort, you might find that your work becomes your passion. It’s all very well reading about the benefits of having a passion or calling in life but, if you haven’t got one, where to find it? Duckworth says it’s a mistake to think that in a moment of revelation one will land in your lap, or simply occur to you through quiet contemplation – rather, you need to explore different activities and pursuits, and expose yourself to the different challenges and needs confronting society.

Yes!

If you still draw a blank, then perhaps it’s worth heeding the advice of others who say that it is not always the case that energy and determination flow from finding your passion – sometimes it can be the other way around and, if you put enough energy into your work, then passion will follow. Consider, for instance, an eight-week repeated survey of German entrepreneurs published in 2014 that found a clear pattern – their passion for their ventures increased after they’d invested more effort into them the week before. A follow-up study qualified this, suggesting that the energising effect of investing effort arises only when the project is freely chosen and there is a sense of progress. ‘Entrepreneurs increase their passion when they make significant progress in their venture and when they invest effort out of their own free choice,’ the researchers said.

Finally, if you think that passion comes from doing a job you enjoy, you’re likely to be disappointed. Consider where you think passion comes from. In a preprint paper released at PsyArXiv, Jachimowicz and his team draw a distinction between people who believe that passion comes from doing what you enjoy (which they say is encapsulated by Oprah Winfrey’s commencement address in 2008 in which she said passions ‘bloom when we’re doing what we love’), and those who see it as arising from doing what you believe in or value in life (as reflected in the words of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón who in his own commencement address in 2011 said ‘you have to embrace with passion the things that you believe in, and that you are fighting for’).

The researchers found that people who believe that passion comes from pleasurable work were less likely to feel that they had found their passion (and were more likely to want to leave their job) as compared with people who believe that passion comes from doing what you feel matters. Perhaps this is because there is a superficiality and ephemerality to working for sheer pleasure – what fits the bill one month or year might not do so for long – whereas working towards what you care about is a timeless endeavour that is likely to stretch and sustain you indefinitely. The researchers conclude that their results show ‘the extent to which individuals attain their desired level of work passion may have less to do with their actual jobs and more to do with their beliefs about how work passion is pursued’.

This is an adaptation of an article originally published by The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest.

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Paul

I’m a Detroiter expat in Tokyo. I’m a consulting security professional and father of two. I promise that my views and politics are mine; not yours or my employer’s or anyone’s. I follow no party or affiliation or anything. I decide for myself and act accordingly with stoic philosophy in mind. My things are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license unless otherwise stated.

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